Hello world

Jan-Philipp Kolb

07/17/2015

Motivation

Fra Mauro Map

Drawing maps has a long history
Fra Mauro map (1450) is the greatest memorial of medieval cartography
Source: Wikipedia

Migrant route to Germany

Used at BBC - get an overview of more maps like this here

The road to Europe

Source: The Independent

Data on the conflict in Syria - UNHCR
Analysis on Syrian Refugee Settlement Clinic Locations with R

GDP per capita

Data source: World Development Indicators

GDP in German federal states

GDP in billion Euro

Map produced with R-package sp
Data source: Wikipedia
Polygon source: Global Administrative Areas (GADM)

More detailed - more interesting?

Social index - Proportion of social benefits recipients in Berlin

Source: Tagesspiegel

Is the necessary data available?

Source

The spatial perspective…

… is relevant to get an overview of current developments
… is relevant to understand circumstances.

But how to get the adequate data?

Often the necessary data is not available
More spatial visualisations are possible with data from web 2.0. If we use Application Programming Interface (API)

A little quiz - which town is it?

Background info

maps of photographic/traffic activity around the world
data from flickr used
guess about picture taker’s mode of transportation
time stamps and distance traveled between a user’s pictures
- Black is walking (less than 7mph),
- Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph),
- Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph);
- Green is freeways or rapid transit.

New York

Source: Eric Fischer

The geotaggers world atlas

World Map Of Touristiness

Source: Touristiness

Based on tourist pictures uploaded on panoramio

Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan

Source: The New York Times

Target / Motivation

The target is to visualize social aspects in maps.

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More examples

Spatial? - Motivation

Massive amounts of data … and growing!
Often freely accessible on the web (e.g. through APIs)
Often unstructured or semi-structured (e.g. web documents, news archives), often heterogeneous
Often not intended for geographic purposes, but implicitly containing geographic info implicitly (Web 2.0)
Often with little or no metadata

Examples

Organisation

Targets

I want to….

… show you examples of useful and less useful visualisations and applications.
… talk about the developments of maps/geography.
… clarify, why it is important for social sciences.
… show you how to produce your own maps/visualisations.
… tell you where you can find data.

Targets

Every participant should present his/her own maps.

Presentation of toolbox (R, Google API, OpenStreetMap etc.)
Learning by doing is very important

Background

Personal information

University of Trier

Source: Website with city maps

Erasmus - Univerity Lyon III

Source: orangesmile

Organisation Gesis

Five departments - Survey Design and Methodology

Monitoring Society and Social Change
Data Archive for the Social Sciences
Computational Social Science
Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences

Gesis

GESIS is:

Infrastructure Services for social sciences
over 250 employees at three sites (Mannheim, Cologne)

GESIS offers:

Consulting for research projects in all phases
Research based services

Tasks GESIS-Team Statistics:

Consulting and research on …

Planning of survey designs
Development of sample designs for face-to-face, written, and telephone-assisted surveys
Data analysis and visualisation

Your background?

Where do you come from?
What are you studying?
What are your main research interests?

Tools for this course

Tools and services

Why use R

Why use R - It’s open source

It’s free
It’s open source
…

R is the leading tool for statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. It is more than a statistical package; its a programming language, so you can create your own objects, functions, and packages.

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/why-use-r/